Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, now called Ahrefs Free, gives you a slice of Ahrefs' professional SEO toolset at no cost, as long as you verify that you own the site. It's for founders who want to find and fix SEO problems and see who links to them. It's free for unlimited verified websites, with a site audit of 5,000 crawl credits a month per project, backlink and keyword views of 1,000 rows at a time, and web analytics up to 1M events per project.
What it can do for you
Run a site audit that lists broken links, missing titles, slow pages and other issues in order of importance. See which sites link to you and which keywords you already rank for, so you know what to build on. Connect it to Google Search Console for a fuller picture of your own search performance.
What people like
Independent reviewers and Reddit users agree it's one of the most useful free SEO tools available for your own site, with data from a tool most professionals pay for. The audit in particular gets strong praise.
The honest downsides
- Your sites only. You can't analyse competitors or sites you haven't verified, which is where paid Ahrefs earns its money.
- Capped views. You see up to 1,000 backlinks and keywords at a time, with limited exports and history.
- Crawl limits. 5,000 crawl credits a month per project won't cover a very large site.
- It shows problems, it doesn't fix them. You or your developer still have to do the work.
Skip it if
- your main need is competitor or keyword research for new topics
- you can't verify ownership of the site
Alternatives
There's nothing we list that's better for free audits of your own site. These work alongside it:
- Google Search Console for Google's own query, click and indexing data.
- Nuwtonic if you want fixes and AI-search tracking for one site, for one payment.
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